GDC: A Sense of Doom

Share.

Why John Romero and Tom Hall's first look back at id's game-changer was such a letdown.

By Dana Jongewaard

The most interesting thing I learned at the Doom post-mortem John Romero and Tom Hall gave at this year's GDC is that the weapons were modeled after toys they bought and then filmed with a video camera.

When you consider that Doom is one of the most important first-person shooters of all time (arguably THE most important), the fact that a throw-away piece of trivia was the best part is a pretty serious letdown.

The prospect of self-reflection about Doom from Hall and Romero was a tantalizing one. When did they know they had something special on their hands? Why did they decide to release it as shareware? What led to the decision to finally release a commercial version of the game? Did the process of making Doom influence how they made Quake? For a long time, Doom became poster child for the video game violence in the mainstream press in many horrible real-world tragedies, and was even cited (wrongfully) as a trigger in the Columbine shootings -- what was that like for them?

Instead of that, however, it was a fairly dry month-by-month walkthrough of the development process, a talk that was essentially all "how" and no "why." How is it that two such giants in the industry couldn't see past Doom's textures and level designs to see what actually mattered about the game and made it so important?

Hall and Romero are very intelligent people, and their success was NOT dumb luck. But after today's talk, it's hard not to wonder it, even if just fleetingly.